10 Forbidden Archives That Disappeared Without a Trace

10 Forbidden Archives That Disappeared Without a Trace It took one afternoon. One man, one fire, one decision — and thousands of years of human knowledge became smoke. The man who did it wrote it down proudly, in his own diary, and history barely blinked. The date was July twelfth, fifteen sixty-two. The place was the town square of Maní, in the Yucatán Peninsula of what is now Mexico.